Are you sure about that?

Right now there is just a fraction of the rooms available in downtown hotels that are outside of the housing block. Look at what they cost. Now go back through the endless forum postings of "But there are plenty of rooms available outside of the housing block! Gen Con doesn't need to change anything!". Downtown hotel rooms outside of the housing block are not massive sellouts like you think. Why would you think that every hotel room downtown would immediately sell out if suddenly every hotel was charging the ***rape prices that out of block hotels are asking for now? Do you really believe that them barely selling out now will translate to twice or more still selling out?

Gen Con has a vested interest in keeping hotel prices down to mere price gouging levels. Gen Con wants us to stay downtown for atmosphere and to bargain for more benefits from Indy due to people spending money downtown. Gen Con does not want us to blow all of our money on a hotel instead of in the exhibit hall. Gen Con does not want people to start skipping attending their show because lodging has become insanely expensive.

Similarly, Indy wants to be known as a great city for conventions. With apologies to people living in Indy it really has very little to offer when it comes to enticing people to spend vacation time there, but it is well set up for hosting big groups for conventions. However, it does have competition (just check out all of the "Indy should move here...." threads). Indy cannot afford to be known as the place where you don't want to hold your convention because you get robbed on hotel costs. Indy wants to give a large housing block to Gen Con to hopefully keep it in Indy for many more years to come.

Let's not kid ourselves, even the rates through the housing block are still price gouging. We are talking Indianapolis here, no basic hotel room downtown should cost over $200 a night plus $30+ to park and a 19% (!) room tax. Just, no. Market value be damned, we are being openly gouged. If every hotel is able to charge $400-500 a room, plus that parking and 19% tax, people are going to start deciding that there are better ways to spend their vacation money.

One of the perks of going to Indy is that a large number people can semi-affordably stay downtown for the convention. Once you lose that the idea of moving the convention to Chicago/Vegas/wherever starts to look pretty good.

Up until this point people were able to pretty consistently use the housing portal to get in block rooms for Gen Con. True, more demand than supply but remember not everyone who bought a badge demanded a room- so your odds were pretty good. Good enough that you could plan a vacation around going to Gen Con, especially if money was tight. And no, "Just go out of block!" and paying an extra $1000 or so in hotel costs isn't a real answer.

Right now you are just left out in the cold for getting a room before you even log in. That is enough to make people change their vacation plans for next year.

Last year you had less people upset about housing simply because a good sized chunk of attendees didn't participate. They didn't care either way. This year many of those same people ended up being handed a room downtown, which means more of the people who did care about getting a room through the housing portal didn't- and more people are upset because of that compared to last year.

Look, you can say the participation trophy approach this year was "fair", but you can't also say that taking rooms away from people who actually wanted to use the housing portal and giving them to people who didn't is also "fair".

Gen Con should care about this if they want to keep their attendance numbers up.

It's for the benefit of Gen Con and the attendees.

Current state of affairs:

~6000 downtown hotel rooms.  Let's assume 80% of them are in block for $250 a night, and 20% of them are out of block for $450 a night (round numbers to prove the point).

Then Gen Con attendees are spending:

6000*.8*250 + 6000*.2*450 = 1,740,000 per day

If there was no block, then there would be 100% of rooms sold at $450 a night: 

6000*1*450 = 2,700,000 per day

That means Gen Con is preserving around 1 million dollars per day for it's attendees.

Guess where some of that money gets spent?

If you said "Gen Con" you win the "I understand economics and also the reason why Gen Con would want to maintain a housing discount" award!  Congratulation!

Two words: Plan ahead.

I know you guys are talking about downtown rooms, but some of the block are outside.  I used my son''s badge to see what was available last week and got a room in the same hotel that I booked in January for 115.00 per night, the housing lottery gave me a price of 179.00 per night.  Nice discount.

I can only imagine that a rack rate room in downtown Indianapolis during one of the biggest conventions of the year in high summer would cost significantly more than a random winter weekend. I'd guess that rack rate>block rate>out of season rate.

Is booking downtown hotels super early (for example, booking hotels for next years gencon) a good option (i.e. do their rate already account for the convention)?

It looks like dates for the show are already announced all the way up to 2020 - http://www.gencon.com/attend/futuredates. 

We have found that most hotels have usually only allowed booking about six months in advance, although some have expanded to a year in the past few years. However, the hotels KNOW that is Gen Con weekend, and rates for out of block rooms are already jacked up- my wife found some of the rates to be as high as $600 a night in past years. Yeah, you may still get lucky and get a room that is "only" marked up "10-15%" over the already bloated prices for getting the room in block (and good for you if you can), but realistically the Gen Con housing plan for thousands of people cannot and should not consist of trying to be one of the people who slips through the cracks.

The Gen Con housing block isn't going anywhere. Any serious talk about what to do about housing problems downtown needs to address that.

I did try to plan ahead, I scoured Hotels.com, individual hotel websites, expedia.com - in all cases I started looking _before_ they would even let you reserve a room out that far.  The best deal I found?  $450 a night at the Conrad.

Maybe "downtown" means something else to the poster, or maybe they have some special access via a membership program, or whatever.

But it's simply not true that you can just look up a downtown hotel and get it for ~15% more by simply planning ahead.

I'm open to being refuted on this point - Mr. "Just plan ahead" need only post quoting this thread showing listings for affordable downtown rooms for Gen Con 2018 at any time in the future.  

I suspect I will not be refuted.

Just to borrow your math again, let me illustrate again why the changes this year to housing were bad both for Gen Con and people who have historically used the housing portal in past years. Say there are 6000 rooms downtown, but only 80% are available through housing. That gives us 4800 rooms. Say, as we know how gamers are, each room holds an average of 4 badge holding attendees. That means that 19200 customers are lucky enough to have rooms through the housing block downtown. 

Off the top of my head attendance was about 60,000ish last year (I may be off a bit, and am willing to adjust numbers if necessary). That means that about 32%, or about a third, of attendees were able to get a spot downtown.

But that 60,000 attendance number is deceptive. Remember, lots of people in previous years did not want to use the housing portal, weren't competition for housing downtown, and had no reason to complain about the housing process. In effect, they are out of the pool entirely for a variety of reasons. As a conservative estimate, we can easily say that a quarter of the overall number of badgeholders could be outright discounted last year. So really, we are looking at 19,200 happy customers out of 45,000- or about 42.66% of the population that actually cared out getting housing through the housing block actually getting housing downtown. Relatively speaking, that's not bad.

This year though Gen Con decided to just hand people who otherwise wouldn't have asked for rooms downtown a room downtown. They are now back in the pool even though they weren't in the pool last year, and now people who have historically actually asked for rooms have lost them to people that haven't. Remember that first figure of 32% of people getting a room downtown through the housing block? That is lower than the 42.66% number I came up with. What does this mean? People who relied on trying to get a room through the housing block had their chances cut by almost a quarter (32% vs 42.66%), meaning more people who will actually get upset about losing out on getting a room and have a reason to complain actually lost out on rooms!

This is NOT good customer service.

As badly as people want to have the knee jerk reaction of "but it is fair this year!" if you look at what actually happened it isn't fair at all, and it actually sowed more discontent amongst attendees who actually used housing in the past.

Now my numbers may not be 100% accurate. There may be a few more rooms available, there may be a few more attendees this year, there may have been a smaller or (probably) larger percent of attendees not logging into the housing portal last year. However, the result is the same- more people who used the housing portal to get rooms last year lost out on rooms this year due to the inclusion of people who haven't used housing, meaning more people who have a reason to complain about the process were given a reason to complain.

There is no doubt that Gen Con will need to update its servers, but it should be doing that anyways.

The real question is will Gen Con change housing back to how it was done last year or will it continue to leave a larger chunk of it's customers out in the cold by continuing with this year's system?

Not looking to refute anyone or crunch the numbers. I'm speaking from personal experience from both this and last years' cons. 

Last year: checked at random times daily starting in September. Landed an out of block king executive suite in October or November at the Embassy downtown for 5 nights for $199/Night plus tax and parking. Breakfast & wifi included free.  

This year: checked at random times daily starting in September. Landed an out of block king suite at the Embassy downtown, which was canceled due to a glitch in their system. RAWR!!! Regrouped and kept looking, and scored an out of block king suite at the Homewood Suites downtown for within $20 of block price for 6 nights. Breakfast and wifi included free. 

That's it. No tricks or smug attitude.  Persistence and patience perpetually pay off. 

Also, by not booking through the housing block last year you actually helped me get my room downtown through the housing block, so thank you for that! But this year, despite you not intending to use the housing portal and already having a room you were still given eligibility to potentially take a room away from someone who actually did want to get a room in the housing block. That is why the system this year cannot be considered "fair".

Figured I'd do a quick search for next year - it does seem like most hotels don't take bookings more than 6 months or 12 months early. But I did see that Columbia Club (just off the circle) does - $179/night. https://www.columbia-club.org/. We're not even at this year's gencon, so hate to think about it already - but free cancellation up until a month before, so...
 

Well, this has been really interesting to read.

I'll throw this out there: in 2014, my brother and I decided we wanted to go to Gencon. It was March or April when we made the decision, so we bought badges and waited for the events list to come out.

We also jumped on Hotwire and found a room for the weekend. I think the whole weekend Wednesday-Sunday cost $250 or $275 for our room. It was wonderful.

Now, we did not get a room downtown. Our hotel was on Meridian, near 86th St. Every day, we drove the 15-20 minutes in and parked at the Mall Garage.

Driving in didn't ruin our con experience. We were able to find a great deal on a room, and I would definitely go that route again if needed.

This year, I'm staying at a friend's house, which is about 7 minutes from the ICC.

I don't think being able to stay within walking distance makes or breaks the convention experience. if you want that, pay for it. If you don't, enjoy the great deals out there :D

Can't this whole thing be at least slightly mitigated by having a set of check boxes when you buy badges that says you'd like to be included in the housing lottery or not?

That way, only those buying badges and needing housing are placed in the lottery. 

My husband bought two badges for us and we didn't need housing, so we'd have opted out. That's one less in the lottery. 

Maybe this is overly simplistic, but wouldn't it at least help?

PS - Our housing time was so late that i guess it really didn't matter, like 10:30pm or something equally ridiculous.